A week ago, I gave an interview to Étienne Paré in The duty. I was then nuanced about the idea that the living arts community should rebel, as in Belgium, and reopen on January 17…
For a week, in the face of the silence of the Minister of Culture, in the face of the observation that the arts community is suffering the repercussions of some of the most severe health rules in the world and that no speech declining a vision of the future on culture, while that this sector is going through a historic crisis, is not mentioned in the public arena by decision-makers… well, nuances no longer have their place.
The performing arts community is internalizing the fact that it is not essential. That’s why I couldn’t name my despair and that of my colleagues two weeks ago during my interview at Duty. We were, the performing arts and I, frozen, with blood in our mouths, beaten up by the bully of the schoolyard, telling us that maybe we were the problem. I had internalized the surrounding discourse.
Today, I went to Place Versailles to buy myself a badminton racket. There was a crowd. It was teeming with life. It was beautiful to see. There were dozens of times more people than can hold the hall of the theater Aux écuries, which I co-direct. Several were eating, huddled together on the benches, no masks. Others lined up less than a meter away in a tiny nail shop, the door closed, in a moment of relaxation, face to face, side by side. Even further, some were in line in their fifties, no distancing, with children running around and crooked masks, for McDonald’s…
These people were having a good Sunday.
But they were certainly no safer than in our quarter-turned theater room.
They were happy.
They were having a good time.
Their government, their society allow them this good time. It is not forbidden.
But for those who don’t have a good time in the mall and in the nail salons, for those for whom the good time is in the performance halls, artists and public of all kinds, why can’t they live their Sunday like the others?
Not only are their needs and desires not considered fairly with the rest of society, but by keeping their network of meanings closed, by making people believe that it is their space of pleasure that causes the overflows in hospitals, and we do violence to them. We tell the artists of the living arts and their amateurs that they are the ones who are superfluous in the assembly of our society.
At the moment, we are choosing, we are directing the imagination of our society.
At the moment, we favor one type of meaning over another.
And faced with this violent discourse, the performing arts community is in the process of internalizing this violence.
He is in the process, individual by individual, of telling himself that he is the margin, the exception, the thing to be excluded. The non-chosen. The schoolyard incompetent.
We know that we are not that incapable.
Today I felt like a kid looking for ways to kick the ass at his bullies on Monday morning…
But the damage is still done: our society chooses.
She chooses trade, manicure and McDonald’s.
She does not choose poetry, the intellect, the collective imagination and the desire for communication.
We will find a way to face the schoolyard on Monday morning because inside us we know that we are no less worth than the blessed people of Place Versailles (to whom I felt jealousy today , I admit it. I wish it had made me happy too. I don’t judge them. I envy them).
If I were interviewed today rather than last week to find out what I think of the closing of performance halls, I would not be nuanced or intimidated.
I would be that child who said to himself: tomorrow, the big one, I won’t let him squeeze me into a corner.